Inspirational women that you probably have never heard of

There are so many amazing and inspirational women that shape our day-to-day lives, and we don’t even think about it. I personally have thought about it, as I just finished the book, Wonder Women, by Sam Maggs. This book talks about some of the most influential/cool women in history. I, inspired by this, did some digging of my own and came up with three women who did some crazy cool stuff, but have never been mentioned.

Let’s start with Lise Meitner. Lise was born on November 7, 1878 in Vienna, Austria. She was the third of eight children in a Jewish family, but she later converted to Christianity.

Lise earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Vienna in 1905, becoming the second woman to do so. In 1912, she joined forces with chemist Otto Hahn at the Kaiser-Wilmer-Institut (KWI) as his “guest”, and she wasn’t paid. Only in 1913 did she gain a permanent position at KWI (injustice #1 of many).

She worked with Hahn for a number of years, making many chemical discoveries, including the “cause of the emission from surfaces of electrons with ‘signature’ energies”. Because she discovered it, of course, it was named… the Auger effect! Who is Auger, you ask? Pierre Victor Auger, a French, male scientist who “discovered it” a year later. Bummer, huh?

Lise Meitner in her element *hehe*

Anyway, in 1926, Lise became the first women in Germany to be a full-time professor, in the University of Berlin. In 1933, Adolf Hitler officially came to power in Germany, and although she was protected by her Austrian citizenship, many of her fellow scientists were forced out of their posts, and moved out of Germany. Meitner stayed, and just kind of hid herself in all her work. She later acknowledged that “it was not only stupid but also very wrong that I did not leave at once.”

As Lise was trying to leave Germany, Kurt Hess, an avid Nazi and German chemist, was trying to point her out to the authorities. Luckily, Meitner eventually escaped to the Netherlands, but she had to travel undercover (pretty cool for a chemist, right?).

In November of that year, Lise and Hahn met to plan a new set of experiments. These were conducted by Hahn and another chemist back in Germany. These experiments essentially discovered nuclear fission.

On November 15, 1945, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the person who discovered nuclear fission, you guessed it, Otto Hahn. Meitner was literally not even mentioned.

However, on a visit to the USA in 1946, she met then president Harry Truman, and received the “Woman of the Year” award from the National Press Club. She lectured Harvard, Princeton, and other universities, receiving honorary doctorates from most of the schools. In 1947, she won the Award for the City of Vienna for sciences. In 1949, she won the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society. Several craters on the Moon and on Venus are named after her, and a new university in Vienna was named the Hahn-Meitner Institut in her honor. In 1960, Meitner was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal, and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. In 2008, the NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, not National Broadcasting Company) Defense School of the Austrian Armed Forces established the “Lise Meitner Award”. And finally, in 1998, element 109 on the Periodic Table of Elements was named “meitnerium” in her honor! And half of these awards were given to her posthumously!

Lise lived out pretty much the rest of her years in the UK. She wrote to Otto Hahn, her chemist partner, that she thought he was a terrible human being, who, instead of protesting Hitler’s inhumane acts, simply stood by and said, “Eh.” Otto, however, claims that they were lifelong friends. Lise Meitner died on October 27, 1968 in Cambridge, UK, and on her tombstone, it reads, “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.”

Next up is Civil War era spy Mary Bowser… or so we think. Truthfully, there is extremely little known about her – yeah, she was that good of a spy. However, based on little fragments from people in Mary’s sphere and a few assumptions, most of her life can be pieced together.

She was born a slave in Richmond, Virginia. When the plantation owner, William Van Lew, died, most of his slaves were freed and then worked in the household. One of these slaves was Mary. The owner’s daughter, Elizabeth (super cool lass, as you’ll find out), was a fervent supporter of the abolitionist movement, and decided to send Mary off to a school in Philadelphia.

After graduating, she married William Bowser (there’s no record of them having any children, but who knows?). Mary stayed in contact with the Van Lews, which is why a lot of information about Mary is found in Elizabeth’s

Mary Bowser (date unknown)

records.

Elizabeth, being anti-slavery and then a supporter of the Union during the war, was pretty much rejected by everyone in Richmond. But she did not stuff herself with chocolates and listen to Eric Carmen while looking wistfully out of a rainy window. Instead, she used her own social rejection as a cover. She delved so thoroughly into her cover that she was called “Crazy Bet” around town. She often went to the local prison to free fellow abolitionists and imprisoned slaves, then hid them in a secret room in her giant, plantation mansion.

One day, a job opened up for a maid in Confederate president Jefferson Davis’ home. Elizabeth urged Varina Davis (his wife) to hire Elizabeth’s own maid, Ellen Bond (who was really just Mary in disguise). Ellen Bond was a slow-moving, dull woman, much different from Mary in real life. As maids were trained to be before the Civil War, Mary was pretty much non-existent to the Davises. Thus, she could listen in on secret Confederate meetings without suspicion, and since she was literate, read the documents available to her all-seeing maid eyes. Mary was Elizabeth’s primary source of information, and until late in the war, fell under no suspicion.

However, Elizabeth and Mary weren’t the only spies in town. Thomas McNiven – by day, a local bakery owner who makes house calls, but by night, secret Union spy – was also in on the fun. When the baker would make deliveries to the Davis house, Mary could talk to him without anybody suspecting that they were spies for the Union. Mary was extremely valuable to the Union effort, because she had access to some of the most important documents of the war, and according to Thomas, she could repeat those documents word-for-word because she had a photographic memory.

She eventually had to flee Richmond in 1865. For the privacy and protection of their lives after the war, most of the records of her, Elizabeth’s, and Thomas’ spy work was destroyed. We don’t know what she was like after the war, and we don’t know the date of her death. Who knows? Maybe Mary is still alive, secretly prowling through the streets of Richmond, spying on suspicious characters (wouldn’t that be weird?).

The last woman that I would like to mention is Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, or as you might know her, Annie Londonderry. She was born in Latvia in 1870. There isn’t really much known about her childhood, except that she immigrated to Boston with her parents as a young girl. When she was 18, she married Max Kopchovsky and had three children within a few years time.

Ok, so onto the exciting part. One day, she was sitting in a Boston pub talking to some of her male friends about Thomas Stevens, a dude in 1887 who rode around the whole world on a bicycle in just over a year. Annies friends pretty much bet that Annie couldn’t make it around the globe on a bicycle. If Annie could do this within 15 months, she would win $5,000, which is around $150,000 in today’s money.

The casual lean of Annie Londonderry

So Annie waved goodbye to her hubbie and her children on June 27, 1894. Truthfully, Annie had literally never ridden a bicycle, so one can’t be quite sure why she felt compelled to do this. Perhaps it was something along the lines of Susan B. Anthony’s quote, that “bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” My hope is that Annie saw this as a way to prove to everyone that women were capable of the same feats as men, and saw this a way to earn a good chunk of dough.

Annie’s gear included her long dress, high collar, and corset, her pearl-handled pistol, a change of clothes, some provisions, and of course, her 42-pound Columbia women’s bike. She signed a deal with Lithia Spring Water Co. for an extra $100 (around $2,500 today) that she would put an ad for the company on her bike, and she would be henceforth known as Annie “Londonderry”.

And so she sailed off, as one newspaper reported her, “like a kite down Beacon Street” on June 27, 1894. First, she traveled to Chicago and arrived on September 24. So far, she had lost 20 pounds and traveled very slowly. So, she donned a lighter, more efficient man’s bike, and donned bloomers and a man’s riding suit.

Annie tried to keep traveling west, but the winter made it impossible. So rode back to New York and sailed to France, arriving in early December. When she arrived in France, her bike was taken by customs officials, her money was stolen, and since she was “too muscular to be a man”, she was categorized in “neutered beings”. However, Annie made it from Paris to Marseilles in two weeks (bike-riding and train) and then boarded the ferry “Sydney”, stopping in Alexandria, Colombo, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki and Kobe. She had to get off the boat and get the signature on her passport from each port to prove that she had actually been there, but she did it!

Annie arrived back in America (in San Francisco, actually) on March 23, 1895. She rode to LA, then through Arizona and New Mexico. She traveled north to Colorado, arriving in Denver on August 12. She traveled through Nebraska, to Chicago, and then took a train back to Boston, arriving on September 24, almost exactly 15 months after she left.

How did she make money while riding a bike, you ask? Well, let’s just say she was a good storyteller – she told people she was an orphan, an accountant, a wealthy heiress, a lawyer, a Harvard medical student, the inventor of a new method of stenography, the cousin of a U.S. congressman and the niece of a U.S. senator to gain more publicity. She also sold souvenirs, such as pins, autographs, and handkerchiefs. She also told tales of nearly being killed by “Asiatics” because they believed that she was a demon, or being on the front lines of Sino-Japanese war of 1895, and falling through a frozen river and being shot in a Japanese prison. Most of her stories were fabricated, but people loved them, and people asked her to lecture at colleges because of them, so they worked.

On October 20, 1895 the New York World described Annie’s trip as “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman.” And so she signed on to write a column under the name “The New Woman”. Her first article was about her bicycling adventure. She wrote, ““I am a journalist and ‘a new woman,’ if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.”

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Zoelle Morrissey

Zoelle Morrissey is a sophomore at Bishop Stang High School, where she plays golf and writes for the Stang Script newspaper. She graduated from Friends Academy where she was on Honor Roll for all three years. Previously Zoe spent all of her ... Read Full